Notes/Restrictions

Open to Gallatin first-year students only.

Description

The Quest for the Holy Grail has captured the modern Western imagination, spawning bestselling fiction, scholarly and conspiratorial study, and no fewer than fourteen feature films dating back to the silent era. Yet our twentieth-century fascination with the legendary Cup is only the most recent incarnation of a long obsession in popular Western culture—an obsession that reaches back in time to at least the twelfth century, and possibly earlier still. In this course, the legend of the Holy Grail will serve as a case study for learning about the Middle Ages and medievalism in our world today. We will study the flourishing of the Grail legend in medieval courtly society, but we will think about other “Grails” as well: quests for the unknown, the unseen, and the unconquered; fascination with conspiracy; and above all, the hope that human beings invest in symbols, not just of the divine, but also of transcendent kindness, compassion, and sacrifice. Readings will include Beowulf , the Perceval legends of Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, Robert de Boron’s Merlin , and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. We will examine our modern associations of the Grail legend with Christian femininity, the Knights Templar, the Papacy, and Leonardo da Vinci. And in dialogue with theorists of anthropology, political science, psychology, and comparative mythology, we will discuss why we pursue holy grails in the first place—what keeps us striving for those tantalizing, ultimately unreachable goals that nevertheless compel us ever forward.